The Scholarship of Teaching: Beyond the Anecdotal

In their proposal for the 2001 Modern Language Association (MLA) forum "Understanding Teaching," James Papp, Heidi Byrnes, and Sue Lonoff (2000) argue that our profession has not articulated a discourse that adequately represents the scholarship of teaching: "Teaching is what virtually everyone in the profession does, and it is frequently what we talk about, but we don't talk about it in the same way that we talk about our scholarship." ¹ The reason, they suggest, is not that teaching has been put out on the periphery but that "the discourse of teaching among university teachers [has] not caught up with advances in other areas of research." When teachers talk about teaching, they note, their conclusions are often more "experiential and instinctive" than "analytical," their activities more "frequently assumed . . . than described."

I am, as Papp, Byrnes, and Lonoff are, concerned about excessive reliance on the experiential and the instinctive as "tools" for teaching, because, if unreflexively used, as they often are, they cannot produce the theoretical knowledge needed to sustain a scholarship of teaching. At the same time, however, I need to point out that, for more than two decades, many thoughtful instances of what the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching would recognize as scholarship of teaching, and of a discourse that adequately articulates it, have marked the fields of composition, literacy, and feminist and multicultural studies. Yet I also want to assert that the scholarship of teaching is not like "traditional scholarship." Although they share fundamental features—theoretical sophistication and rigorous analysis of texts—the scholarship of teaching is neither a mere extension of nor an application of traditional scholarship. The most salient characteristic of the scholarship of teaching (which in my work I have called "pedagogy as reflexive praxis" [Salvatori 1996: 345]) is unprecedented attentiveness to students' work, their cultural capital, and their learning as a litmus test for the theories that inform a teacher's approach. This focus has fostered an understanding of the classroom as a site where student voices are actually heard, where their knowledges are actually acknowledged and engaged, where teachers reconceive teaching and themselves as they learn to ask and to address simple but consequential questions like, what does it mean for me to teach this text with this approach to this population of students at this time in this classroom? ²

It might be argued, then, that to suggest the lack of a discourse that adequately represents the scholarship of teaching is a gesture of misrecognition. But insofar as this misrecognition is shared by many throughout English studies (although for different reasons), only to name it and then dismiss it as such can keep us from asking such revealing questions as: What makes this misrecognition possible? Which cultural and ideological forces give it power?

In this essay I want to focus on an academic style often deployed to represent teaching, and to discuss what this style may have to do with the perceived lack of a discourse that adequately represents the scholarship of teaching. Because it displays features of the anecdote, I call this style "the anecdotal," and I use the trope of "talk" as a point of entry into my argument.

I want to begin with an example. In Conversions George P. Elliott (1971: 83-84) recollects "the finest classroom experience" he ever had:

One day a few years ago a dear friend came to town, and we stayed up till four in the morning talking and drinking. The next day at ten past one in the afternoon, I walked into a classroom with 70 or so students in it and began to talk about the Book of Job. I knew it well, though I had not reread it for a long time and had not taught it before. I had spent ten minutes looking blankly at the text before class. I had only the foggiest notion about what I was going to say, and 75 minutes to fill. What in fact...